59
JOHN LACK
‘The great madness of 1914–18’:
families at war on Melbourne’s
eastern and western fronts
At 41 Kooyong Road on Sunday morning, 2 August 1914, James and Edith
Lewis and their eight children began their regular walk to the Armadale
Presbyterian church. As Brian recalled more than 60 years later:
That first Sunday of August had a feeling different from all previous
Sundays, a feeling of being on the edge of something immense and terrible
– but exciting. If England went to war, so would we. Andrew Fisher, the
Labor leader, had just said so in an election speech: in ‘to the last man and
the last shilling’.1
War seemed inevitable. So their walk to church was solemn, the demeanour
of the congregation serious, the remarks of their minister ominous:
War was almost upon us despite his [the minister’s] requests of last Sunday.
Today his requests were being supported by every Presbyterian church in the
State and all the other churches, even the Catholic, and some notice by God
was warranted. Now if God allowed the war to start, Mr Millar expected
him to support our just cause. We were not too sure why it was just, we
would be better informed in a week or two … This would be Armageddon
with all the first-class nations of Europe at each other’s throats. Let us be
worthy of the sacrifice asked of us.2
Passing the railway station on his return from Sunday school, Brian’s
brother read the latest news on a placard: Germany had declared war on
60
The La Trobe Journal No. 96 September 2015
Russia, and France had mobilised. Next morning’s Argus newspaper announced
the greatest war in world’s history, for which the British dominions were
preparing, Canada having already offered 30,000 troops. And, on Tuesday
4 August, australia joins. fleet and 20,000 men. offer by federal cabinet. The
Liberal government had made these offers while a deeply divided British
cabinet was still considering its options, and before any request was made for
Australian support.3 Australia was rushing headlong to war in the middle of
a general election. Andrew Fisher’s pledge, as Labor opposition leader, was a
riposte to Prime Minister Joseph Cook’s declaration that ‘when the Empire is
at war, so is Australia at war’.4 War for Australia became a fait accompli, and
the election became a khaki election, fought over the parties’ defence records
and the depth of their loyalty to the Empire.
Once war was a fact, the newspapers, initially apprehensive, became
enthusiasts for war, and were dependent on press releases approved by
the British Government and military. Enthusiasm grew most quickly and
strongly, perhaps, among the Australian middle and upper classes: politicians,
professionals, businessmen and, above all, the clergymen, who displayed a
remarkable unanimity of outlook.5 The General Assembly of the Presbyterian
Church, for example, charged responsibility for the war to ‘German, and
especially Prussian, militarism’, which it was right for the imperial government
and the dominions to resist. This resolution was carried ‘amidst a scene
of intense enthusiasm’, the audience rising en masse and singing the
national anthem.6
Enthusiasm for the war was, however, far from unanimous. There was
considerable reserve, even opposition to the war, among socialists and trade
union leaders, and suspicion among the broad working class, where it was
rightly anticipated that war would disrupt trade, and bring unemployment
and social distress in its wake.7 Patriotic middle-class Armadale was a world
away from Melbourne’s industrial working-class western suburbs, where
Thomas and Eliza Purcell and four of their six children lived at 21 Berry Street,
Yarraville. Tom kept a diary from 1883 until his death in 1920.8 Although
the volume covering 1914 has not survived, there can be little doubt that
the Purcells, devoutly observant Catholics, attended mass at St Augustine’s,
Yarraville, in the weeks that took the Empire to war. The response of the
Catholic hierarchy to the outbreak of war was similar in essentials to that
of Protestant clerics, but it was less bellicose and differed in emphasis. ‘We
as Catholics,’ Melbourne’s Archbishop Thomas Carr said, ‘are called upon by
our religious principles, our loyalty and our self-interest to join heartily with
our fellow-citizens in aiding the mother country to defend the Constitution
‘The great madness of 1914–18’
which is certainly the best balanced that the world has ever known.’9 The war
was a just war and Catholics could enlist with good conscience, yet Catholics
should pray ‘that the horrors of war in Europe may be of short duration’.10
August 1914 was a fraught month for the global Catholic Church. The day
after war broke out, the ailing Pope Pius X, distraught with the failure of his
efforts to prevent war, took to his bed, dying heartbroken just weeks later.
Tom Purcell’s diary provides striking evidence of the Catholic disposition
to lament the war, pray for peace and endorse the peace initiatives of the
new pope, Benedict XV. Militant Australian Protestants could comprehend
neither Benedict’s neutrality nor his indictment of military conscription for
prolonging and deepening the carnage.
These subtly different responses of Protestants and Catholics to the
outbreak of war, as Michael McKernan has pointed out, ‘contained the seeds
of future dispute’.11 Protestants believed that war itself would produce
spiritual gains: as nothing occurred without God’s approval, the war had to
be accepted as His redemptive plan for a world that needed spiritual renewal.
Catholic leaders regarded the war as a judgement on mankind. They also hoped
that Catholic loyalty would lessen sectarianism and secure state financial
support for their religious schools. As Protestant imperial patriots became
more strident, and their advocacy of enlistment, recruitment and (eventually)
conscription more vehement, differences with lay Catholics widened.
The issue of Home Rule for Ireland had already placed Irish Catholics and
Ulster Presbyterians at loggerheads, and the shelving of Home Rule, the Easter
1916 rebellion in Dublin, and the two attempts to introduce conscription
in 1916 and 1917, fuelled fiery confrontations in Melbourne.
A demographic reality underlay these confrontations; in Victoria the
Catholic and Presbyterian churches were numerically only the second and
third largest denominations (22.3 and 18.3 per cent respectively, after the
Church of England with a nominal 37 per cent), but their leaders were among
Melbourne’s ablest public speakers.12 The Lewises of Armadale, certain that
Presbyterians comprised the largest church, saw their local congregation as
an extension of their family: ‘a bigger family than our own [that] gives us a
feeling of greater security.’ Indeed, Brian wrote, ‘we are at church because
it is comforting to be with others of similar views, a group with no social
divisions and no aristocracy, spiritual or temporal, and we are more than
satisfied that our group is the most solid and most enlightened’.13 Smug and
confident Anglophiles, suspicious of foreigners (especially Irish Catholics),
their Presbyterianism fed their venom against Catholics, amongst whom
the Purcells could be counted the most committed.14 Tom and Eliza went
61
62
The La Trobe Journal No. 96 September 2015
to confession and attended mass regularly, raised their children in the faith,
sent them to the local parish school, and had the satisfaction of seeing them
married in the church. As well as the Age and the Herald, Tom read the weekly
Catholic Tribune, was a member of Catholic abstinence, educational, friendly,
and charitable societies,15 and was public spirited in his support for the victims
of war. A former member of the Victorian railways union and a branch officebearer, he remained staunchly pro-union. He kept a record of his life in a diary
that he maintained, with some gaps, from 1881 until his death in 1920.
Diaries, it has been suggested, are written not so much for the self, as for
an audience, and are shaped by that anticipated readership.16 Tom’s diary,
however, seems to have been written, not with an eye to posterity, but rather as
a record of his religious devotions, expenditure, friendships, correspondence,
and domestic life. Rarely concerned with his emotional life or private
thoughts, his diary reveals Tom as a contented married man in the autumn of
his life. The diary most clearly resembles (in Katie Holmes’s words) ‘a means
of ordering experience and establishing control over one’s life’,17 when Tom
tried to make sense of the war in Europe and the troubles at home. Brian
Lewis’s memoir – not My War, but Our War – presented as a family memoir,
is something of a melange of personal and group reminiscence, and history
gathered mostly from the conservative daily morning newspaper, the Argus.
Lewis’s distancing cynicism is that of a veteran of a second World War, which
was a consequence of ‘the war to end all wars’ that his generation had learned
to regard as a tragic mistake. The reader of Our War can sometimes find it
difficult to distinguish genuine 1914–18 memories from the overlay of later
experience and reflections. There are factual and interpretive errors, too, but
some of these, notably concerning Catholic Archbishop Daniel Mannix, are
instructive. Tom Purcell’s diary and Brian Lewis’ memoir are not necessarily
representative Melburnian responses to the Great War, but powerful and
illuminating illustrations of the social and political polarisations that occurred
in those fraught years on the home front.
The Lewises and the Purcells: from goldseekers to suburbanites
Both Brian Lewis and Tom Purcell were descended from gold rush emigrants,
who shaped the first half century of Victoria’s history. Brian’s father, James
Bannatyne Lewis, was the third of 12 children (nine surviving infancy) born to
John and Mary Lewis. John is described by his great-grandson and biographer
as a ‘struggling [gold] fossicker, lucky quartz reefer, oppressive magnate,
feckless speculator, and ultimate failure’.18 The wanderlust son of a London
baker, he arrived in 1852 and tried his luck firstly on the Victorian diggings at
‘The great madness of 1914–18’
McIvor’s Creek (Heathcote) before heading to the ‘new diggings’ at Waranga
and the Goulburn. At Whroo, Lewis established an open-cut quartz mine that
won him and his partners gold worth £150,000. Ill-judged mining speculations
and life as ‘a generous spendthrift’19 brought financial ruin. His sons had to
leave Scotch College, the parents separated, and the family dispersed. John
spent his final years alone and in poverty.
James, the most talented of the sons, graduated from the university as a civil
engineer. When he married Edith Haynes (Victorian-born of English parents) in
1888, he was working for the largest engineering contractor in Victoria, David
Munro and Co., and, during the 1890s depression, he was in turn director of the
Daylesford School of Mines, an engineer with the Melbourne and Metropolitan
Board of Works, and a noted bridge-builder in northern Tasmania. The family
returned to Melbourne in 1908–09.20 For young Brian the move was a decline
from social prominence to social anonymity, from bush excitement to suburban
routine: ‘At Armadale we are just fair-sized fish in a distressingly large pool …
we are just people like everyone else … Half a mile to the north are the socially
desirable houses of Toorak, and half a mile to the south are the big mansions in
acres of land for the very rich.’21 His older brothers attended Wesley College,
one of ‘the Six’, Melbourne’s great ‘public’ (that is fee-paying, and therefore
private) schools. Armadale was bourgeois and boring – until the war came. ‘The
Melbourne middle class,’ Janet McCalman has observed, ‘needed the war: here
was their historical opportunity to recover self-respect after the psychic and
financial disaster of the 1890s.’ In addition, their churches were in spiritual
decline, science and modern Biblical criticism having undermined distinctive
Protestant doctrines. Presbyterians, in particular, had been socially discredited
by their central role in the 1890s banking crisis that had laid Victoria waste.
They and their fellow Protestants took refuge, firstly in patriotism, and then
‘looked increasingly to bigotry to bolster congregational solidarity’.22 Bigoted
patriotism was to prove a barren strategy.
By contrast Catholicism around 1900 was healthy, ‘more disciplined and
effective than it had ever been before in Australia’,23 founded as it was in
Victoria on a generation of aspiring Irish, independent and assisted gold rush
emigrants, distance and expense having excluded most of the crushed victims
of the Irish famine. John and Mary Purcell were among these ambitious
and improving migrants. Tom, born in Melbourne in 1853 after his parents’
arrival from Kilkenny, Ireland, via South Africa, was the first of four surviving
children. When they left Melbourne, however, the Purcells got no further
than the Heathcote (McIvor) diggings that John Lewis had rejected the year
before. John Purcell was goldmining there by 1854 and, during the 1850s, at
63
64
The La Trobe Journal No. 96 September 2015
least three of John’s siblings joined him, married Irish Catholic partners, and
raised their families. This chain migration and settlement gave the extended
Purcell clan a strong presence in Heathcote.24
By the mid 1870s, however, goldmining was in decline and Heathcote
offered limited prospects for the second generation. Tom’s diary for
1883–84 records the exodus of the young, including his three sisters who left
for Melbourne where they entered domestic service or the clothing trades.
Tom also went to Melbourne where he faced five months of casual work
before he was made a permanent hand at the Spencer Street railway goods
sheds: ‘I got badge No. 172.’ Tom was a saver, and was soon able to buy a
house block in Yarraville (a subdistrict of the municipality of Footscray), and
marry his Heathcote sweetheart Eliza Crowder. Tom and his sisters celebrated
Christmas 1887 in their homes at Yarraville, Footscray and Braybrook. As Tom
noted with satisfaction on 12 December, after a thunderstorm: ‘our tank is
flowing over’. The families were living close enough to render mutual support
in the challenging years that followed the heady 1880s – the terrible 1890s
depression, his in-laws’ periods of unemployment, family bereavements, and
their parents’ ageing and decline.25
The family of James and Edith Lewis, founded in Prahran and Caulfield in
the 1890s, completed in Tasmania in the early 1900s, and now finally settled
in Armadale, seems to have been a nuclear family with attenuated links to
almost all but James’s mother and spinster sisters. By contrast, the Purcells
came to Melbourne but, rather than disperse, they formed an extended family
on the pattern of their parents and their parents’ siblings at Heathcote.
Ethnic identity, religious faith and class loyalty produced a close-knit Irish
Catholic working-class clan struggling through good and bad times in
Melbourne’s western industrial suburbs. At Armadale, the Lewis family
exemplified a contrasting story of geographical and upward social mobility,
and material success. Not even forced wartime economies would be permitted
to ruffle appearances. Such movements from gold-town Victoria to settle in
the western and eastern suburbs, replicated by tens of thousands of families
and young couples, epitomised Melbourne’s process of growth, social
differentiation and political bifurcation in the 30 years to 1914.
‘We had a lot of men in the family; would we be involved?’
There was never really any doubt. Most of the seven Lewis boys (and, for that
matter, all five Purcell boys) were part of the cohort that was exactly the age
for service in the Great War. Sacrifice was the core theme of the faith the
Lewis family professed, and patriotic duty and loyalty flowed axiomatically
‘The great madness of 1914–18’
from their social position. James was ‘a confident man who was doing well’
and his children were on track for solid professional careers. Keith, aged
23, was a university graduate in mining engineering, working in Tasmania.
Athol (21), Phyllis (19) and Owen (18) were at university; Athol in his second
last year of law, Phyllis in her first year of Arts, and Owen in his first year
of engineering. Ralph (20) was at the Working Men’s College completing his
final year of geology, and intending to study engineering at university. Ronnie
(17) and Neil (12) were at Wesley College, and Brian (nearly 8) expected to
follow them. This was the way the Lewises saw the world: father was a leader,
and his sons would be leaders; the middle class led and gave orders, and their
orders were followed. Modern armies worked that way, too. Brian articulated
his family’s world view: ‘It was a splendid war to be in,’26 and they, as part of
the middle class, would lead ‘the first middle-class war in our history.’27 When
their photograph was taken in 1915, Brian reflected, we were ‘well-dressed
and comfortable. We would never again have such tidy clothes and we would
never all be together again. The war would blow us apart’.28
Yet their initial response to the war was prudent. The Lewis boys did
not rush to enlist; Keith offered himself for the engineers but, becoming
impatient with the delay, enlisted in the infantry in 1915, and went off to the
Dardanelles. Owen, turning 18 and very keen to serve, was persuaded to finish
his university year first, as his older brothers were doing. Meantime the family
threw itself into patriotic activities, not expecting to be discomfited by the
war. A family of ten in an imposing, if rented, two-storey house, the Lewises
had two maids (‘that put us at the very top of the Armadale social ladder’),29
a washerwoman-charlady, and two gardeners. ‘Father carried us and all these
people comfortably on his back.’30 Armadale was not the very top socially,31
but ‘we were solid people’.32 Suddenly the family finances collapsed.
The war disrupted shipping and trade and, when the government forbade
the export of gold, Australia’s mining industry was devastated.33 When his
consulting work evaporated, James abandoned his Queen Street office and
withdrew to his study. Edith, anxious about living on borrowed money, took
over the budget and with it family leadership. James seemed to shrink: ‘The
dashing and romantic father of peace-time began to look like some old bloke
who pottered about the place.’34 There was no real hardship, but Brian was
humiliated by having to attend the local state school instead of Wesley. His
father attempted to join the Australian Mining Corps, but failed the medical.
The successful candidate, older and less experienced, was posted overseas to
supervise the very tunnelling operations on the Western Front that would
later involve James’s sons Keith and Ralph.
65
66
The La Trobe Journal No. 96 September 2015
Working-class Melbourne had more to worry about than injured egos and
the struggle to keep up appearances. In good times the Purcells looked upon
a hive of activity in Yarraville’s wharves, where vessels unloaded cargoes of
raw sugar, hemp and guano for the mighty Colonial Sugar refinery, Miller’s
ropeworks, and a trio of superphosphate works. Yarraville workers depended
on farmers’ demands for fertiliser, binder twine and farm machinery, and
on stevedores’ need for wheat stackers during the summer harvest. But the
spring rains failed in 1914, delivering Victoria its worst drought for a decade.
The drought, together with shipping shortages and the collapse of building
and construction, plunged working-class suburbs into gloom. Victorian
unemployment doubled in 1913–14 to one in seven trade unionists, perhaps
the highest rate since the 1890s depression; food prices began their rise (by
28 per cent to June 1917); wages stalled and real wages fell. Joblessness and
want, as well as adventurism and patriotism, boosted enlistments in 1914 and
1915.35 There was no immediate crisis in the Purcell household. Tom, recently
retired on a railway pension, and Lizzie, had raised their six children on his
slender income, and those still living at home – Tom (aged 25), George (23),
Kathleen (20) and Leo (17) – were working as, respectively, a clerk, a sugar
boiler at the refinery, a shop assistant, and an apprentice moulder. Tom was
able to pay his friendly society dues, support his church, and contribute to
many funds raised for the victims of war, notably Belgian relief.36
Schoolboy Brian Lewis recalled the war starting well – ‘we were winning
easily’37 – with the surrender of German colonies in the Pacific to Australian
expeditionary forces, and several British naval victories. Responsibility for the
war was clarified by the German attack on Belgium: ‘Germany had invaded
[Belgium] and so started the war,’38 which made it ‘the Kaiser’s war, right to
the end.’39 Paid by the British Government, Reuters news agency flooded
the press with invented or exaggerated stories of German atrocities against
Belgian civilians. Eight-year-old Brian Lewis was shocked:
Belgian boys had their arms cut off and were forced to walk over their
fathers’ bodies, or to carry their decapitated heads – a very difficult thing
to do [the children at his kindergarten thought] with no hands – and their
sisters went raving mad as a result.40
Such propaganda turned some of the wisest heads. Within weeks ‘our
Germans’ went from being the most respected group to ‘the most despised and
hated.’41 The Lewises, however, stood by their German relatives and friends.
Tom’s diary opened in February 1915 with observations of the weather,
family and friends, local news – and the war. He read in the Herald the British
‘The great madness of 1914–18’
The Lewis family in 1915 before it was ‘blown apart’ by the war: (back, l–r) Ronnie,
Owen, Keith, Athol, Ralph; (front, l–r) Phyllis, Mother, Father, Brian, Neil.
From Brian Lewis, Our War (1980). Reproduced courtesy Estate of Brian Lewis
praise of the Australian troops’ conduct during their ‘baptism of fire in Egypt’
against the Turks along the Suez Canal, and also of the Commonwealth’s
offer of a third contingent to bring the total to 60,000 (about the number of
Australian lives that would be lost in the war). Tom noted ‘some losses’. There
was more drama in reports of ‘desperate engagements’ between the German
and Russian armies. Despite a six-mile advance into Poland, the Herald
assured readers, ‘Russia’s position is considered absolutely safe’ owing to the
Russians’ ‘marked artillery superiority over the Germans’ whose slaughtered
dead blocked their advance. The Herald did not report that the 40,000 Russian
casualties doubled the 20,000 German dead.
Censorship, as Faye Anderson and Richard Trembath have pointed out,42
was imposed at three levels: in the field by Allied armies, by quarantining
correspondents from the action, and by correspondents, anxious for lively
copy, imaginatively dressing up the scant information they received.
As a result, Australian press coverage of the Great War, even by Australian
official war correspondents, was from the outset characterised by optimism,
anticipations of glorious success, and silence about the horrors and huge
casualties. Reports of failure were delayed, uninformative, bereft of truth
67
68
The La Trobe Journal No. 96 September 2015
and realism, and flavoured with upbeat and victorious terminology. When
casualties were featured at all, Allied losses were rarely reported and enemy
losses inflated. Serious newspaper readers like James Lewis and Tom Purcell
found it difficult to comprehend what was happening on any of the fronts.
Brian Lewis: ‘The British and French were winning victory after victory … but
the victory seemed to evaporate in a week or two and the names dropped back
into obscurity,’43 and it was difficult to know what was happening at all in
the East. A map of the fronts was fixed to the wall in the Lewis breakfast
room, with pins marking the Allied advances: ‘moving the pins was a morning
ritual done by father after breakfast.’ The result was puzzling: the pins moved
in the wrong direction in the East, and on the Western Front they shuffled
backwards and forwards: ‘Every time the [black] pins moved, hundreds of
thousands of Germans were killed. We were pleased about that, but would
have liked the red [British] pins to move forward.’44 Four months of war on the
Western Front for France and Germany made 1914 the deadliest year of the
entire war. In Europe the immense scale of the casualties was apparent even
without the disclosure of actual numbers, but Australians hardly appreciated
that both allies and enemies had suffered huge losses that dwarfed those
of recent wars.45 The British Cabinet had been warned by Lord Kitchener,
Britain’s new secretary of state for war, that the war would last three years
and absorb an army of one million volunteers.46 His guesstimate was already
proving optimistic.
‘Our sort of people demanded that every young man should enlist’
‘Leo and George went up … to enlist … unfortunately, both passed’
Keith Lewis was among the steady stream of volunteers from the Armadale
Presbyterian church early in 1915,47 one of those clean-living Sir Galahads
who, in Brian’s eyes, enlisted from a deep moral compulsion, in contrast with
‘those who went in because they were out of work and the pay was very good’.48
Such middle-class boys obeyed the obligations of their class, their patriotism
reinforced by the strident patriotism of the Protestant public schools and their
churches. ‘The people of Australia – that is, our sort of people – demanded that
every young man should enlist, and every young man was reminded of it in
conversation, by the newspapers, and by Lord Kitchener.’49
On 30 April, some days after the British press, Australian newspapers
carried news of the Allied invasion of the Gallipoli peninsula. ‘The details of
the operations’, the Argus commented, ‘are tantalisingly brief.’50 In truth, the
Australian Government had little idea where their troops’ first significant
action had taken place. On 3 May, Tom noted ‘The first list of Australians
‘The great madness of 1914–18’
killed in Turkey’, on 4 May ‘The second list of Australians today over 50
killed total’ and, on 5 May, ‘over 40 officers of the Australian forces killed’.51
Not until 8 May was the Gallipoli landing described in much detail, and
then by an English correspondent, Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, the hyperbole
of whose ‘eyewitness’ account of heroic bayonet charges, written aboard
ship in the Aegean, remained fixed in the minds of impressionable boys like
Brian Lewis ‘and … never replaced when the real facts filtered back to us.
The fantasy became history’. Not for Tom Purcell, whose diary contained
no echo of Ashmead-Bartlett but an understanding of the horror contained
in casualty lists and letters from the wounded: ‘One of the Walters got his
arm blown off at the Dardanelles,’ Tom wrote on 13 May. ‘Several of the
Footscray boys wounded [and] over 1000 casualties up to the present.’ His
son, Leo, keen to enlist, had gone for a medical examination in March while
still three months short of his 18th birthday. He would have to await
his parents’ permission.
From late May, Tom’s diary is studded with the names of the dead,
wounded and missing, and references to the casualty lists – ‘nearly 1000
dead of the Australians’ (6 June), ‘great number of Victorian soldiers missing’
(15 June) – and to the July surge in enlistments. These included his two youngest
sons: ‘Leo and George went up tonight to enlist’ (14 July) and ‘George and Leo,
unfortunately, both passed’ (15 July). Soon Tom and Eliza were visiting them at
Seymour military camp. By August many wounded were returning: ‘Les Rowe
back from the Dardanelles, but going back in a fortnight’s time’ (15 August),
and ‘he is looking well’ (21 August). But this was sheer fantasy; by Christmas
Les had been discharged. The news grew steadily worse: ‘over 300 [Anzac]
officers fallen’ (28 August), ‘3000 wounded Australians in hospital in England’
(10 September). Wounded diggers who came home to Victoria exceeded 5000
in 1915, 8000 in 1916, 16,000 in 1917, and 25,000 in 1918, totalling more than
40 per cent of those who had embarked, and most of them so badly damaged,
physically and mentally, that they were of no further use in battle.52 This was
the home front’s constant, grim backdrop.
Why had George and Leo enlisted? One can only speculate. Volunteers
under 21 years required parental permission, and Tom and Lizzie probably
suspected that, had they refused, Leo would have enlisted under a false name.
A strapping young man, 5 feet 10 inches in his socks, weighing 10 stone,
and with a chest measurement of 37 inches, he broke his indentures as an
apprentice moulder to enlist.53 George and Leo were close, and George may
have enlisted to keep him company, but CSR, George’s employer, was also
topping up their workers’ military pay. Certainly the boys wanted to join the
69
70
The La Trobe Journal No. 96 September 2015
same company and their father used his political influence to secure this. On
11 November, Tom noted, the ‘boys went away to the war yesterday. Mum
went to see them off’. He clearly disapproved, although there is not yet a hint
anywhere in his diary of opposition to the war. He seems to have regarded
every enlistment as lengthening a war that he earnestly wanted ended: ‘This
Sunday,’ he recorded on 21 March, ‘was a great day in the church praying for
the peace of the world, there was a great number at H[oly] C[ommunion] this
morning.’ On 21 November he joined the Hibernians’ procession to support
the Wounded Soldiers’ Fund. He noted Andrew Fisher’s replacement as prime
minister by ‘Mr Hughes’ and, on 29 November there appeared the first hint of
Tom’s disaffection: ‘They are offering another 50,000 men and they cannot get
enough for reinforcements.’ On 9 December his boys cabled their arrival in
Cairo and, on 22 December, the Age published the 125th casualty list, with 538
new names. ‘They are talking,’ Tom wrote on 22 December, ‘of conscription
for single men in England.’
When Keith Lewis was on his way to Gallipoli, a wall map of the
Dardanelles appeared in the breakfast room at 41 Kooyong Road: ‘but the
pins moved forward just as swiftly as they did on the map of France.’54 Brian
Lewis’s account of Gallipoli is a somewhat confusing melange of recollections
of 1915 and insights that appear to have been drawn from later reading. As
John Williams makes clear in his study of the Anzac legend as a press-created
phenomenon, the landing on 25 April took second place in British papers to
the Ypres campaign in Belgium and, after the flourish of propaganda around
Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett’s dispatches, Gallipoli was ‘submerged under a welter
of other war publicity’ that refocused attention on the war in Flanders.55
Tom Purcell might not have had a clear picture of what was transpiring on
Gallipoli, but he assembled enough scraps of information to be appalled by
the steady escalation of the carnage. The press coverage of the Western Front
left him dubious. When on 14 May he read a Herald report of desperate battles
being waged between Arras and the coast, attended by ‘heavy losses’ on both
sides but ‘slaughter’ of the Germans, he concluded that ‘There has been heavy
slaughter on both sides’.56 Purcell was right to be sceptical, for the truth was
actually the reverse. When the second Battle of Ypres wound down on 25 May
the British had lost 59,000 and the Germans 35,000. Tom found the reporting
of the Eastern Front similarly doubtful. When the Herald assured readers
that the evacuation of Warsaw was ‘A voluntary, orderly retirement’ under
‘No pressure by enemy’, Tom had already concluded, on the basis of earlier
reports, ‘Russians being beaten back by the Germans, they have not sufficient
arms or ammunition’.57
‘The great madness of 1914–18’
Gallipoli gave the Armadale congregation ‘its first death of the war’ –
Lt Keith Borthwick of the 10th Light Horse. Losses among the extended Lewis
family are recalled rather perfunctorily: ‘our distant cousin … lost her fiancée,
father and brother. Mother asked her to stay with us to cheer her up, but she
remained pretty miserable.’ For Brian ‘Most of the fun had gone out of the
war’.58 His account has none of the cumulative power of Tom Purcell’s brief
diary notes. Gallipoli, having settled into a stalemate, gave rise to ‘a sort of
sour pride’ in the Lewis household, the campaign steeped in controversy and
rancour that found its way into the British and then the Australian press. The
Argus quoted The Times view of Gallipoli as ‘a costly experiment’. News of
Keith’s evacuation to Malta disturbed the Lewis family, and the evacuation of
Anzac shocked them: ‘It had been a bad year.’59
In 1916, Owen Lewis, having finished his year of study as agreed, was free
to enlist; Athol, intending to marry, hoped the war would be over before he
was needed; Ralph ‘now was feeling ashamed that he had not enlisted’. So
when the three brothers enlisted early in the year they did so from a sense of
what we might call bourgeois oblige: ‘All of our friends claimed to be middle
class, and enlistment was expected as a middle-class duty … and although there
[had not been in 1915] any great pressure to enlist, both Athol and Ralph felt
that they should join at the proper time.’60 Keith, fortunate to be transferred
to the Engineers from the 22nd Infantry Battalion before it was mauled in
France, came home on sick leave in February 1916. He disappointed Brian
because he had ‘no stories of the gallantry and glory of war’, and preferred
mufti to uniform. Keith made an exception on the Sunday all four brothers
had weekend leave: ‘The whole family went to church, just like the old days,
and mother was so proud of her four sons in uniform, all with rank of some
sort from lieutenant down to two corporals.’61
On 11 January Tom Purcell read that the withdrawal from Gallipoli had
been completed, but all he knew was that this sons were somewhere in Egypt.
They had disembarked at Suez in December, where their unit (B Company,
29th Battalion, Tivey’s 8th Brigade of the 5th Division) was responsible for
defending a sector of the Suez Canal. Tom wrote to them regularly, sometimes
twice a week, and they replied every week or fortnight. Censorship ensured
that he rarely knew exactly where they were. Instructions issued in December
1914 to cover correspondence stipulated:
Letters and interviews [with soldiers] may state what ‘Private Brown of
the 105th Regiment’ has seen, and describe the incidents of war, but names
of places, dates, names of other ships or units, or of senior commanding
71
72
The La Trobe Journal No. 96 September 2015
officers, must be left blank unless actually passed by the Censor. It is no
excuse to say that the incident occurred some time ago.62
‘All is well on Somme Front’
There were long delays in war news. The first Australian arrivals in France
during March were announced only two months later. ‘There is a great number
of the Australians in France’, Tom noted on 11 May. Postal delays of up to two
months further increased anxieties. On 8 July Tom and Eliza received letters
and cards from Egypt that said the boys were preparing to leave Egypt, but
they already knew from the Age of 28 June that Colonel Tivey’s brigade had
arrived in France. In any case, the five to six weeks’ delay in receiving letters
eliminated the risk of revealing salient details to the enemy.63 Censorship could
not prevent letters conveying the despair at the loss of mates, the decimation
of entire units, and the terrible slog of war, but in obscuring press reportage
of the reality of war and in disguising differences between defeat and success,
censorship created home-front confusion, alarm and distrust. Lord Kitchener
imposed tighter field censorship on the Western Front than General Ian
Hamilton had at the Dardanelles. Vigilant press officers accompanied war
correspondents, yet even on the occasions when they were given direct access
to the front, correspondents adhered to the official script in writing only
about valour and courage.64
‘Not much news of the war this week’, Tom wrote on 28 January, in a
diary entry brimming with information about the productivity of his 12
laying hens. Shortly there was high drama: ‘Great fight near … Verdun one
of the fiercest battles of the war. Germans have gained ground enormous
losses’.65 Needless to say, Tom never learned the actual losses: 100,000 on
each side by April, and perhaps 250,000 each by July. On 3 July he reported
‘Great bombardment by the British for a distance of about 25 mile front’.
Thus opened the British offensive on the Somme, the first day of which cost
them 50,000 casualties, the first fortnight 100,000, and a total of 400,000 by the
time it ended in November. ‘Nothing resembling the actual catastrophe’, John
Williams comments, ‘was reported in the press at that time’, but the people at
home could hardly be duped into regarding the Somme as a glorious victory.66
Nor was the Lewis family: ‘we could see the gains on the map in the breakfast
room, nearly six miles in one place, but the main German defences were still
intact.’67 Despite continued assurances of victory on the Somme, ‘our maps
did not show it’.68
On 19 July the Fifth Australian Division, composed of Gallipoli veterans
and raw troops from Egypt (including George and Leo’s 29th Battalion) was
thrown into battle at Fromelles in northern France, in a diversion intended
‘The great madness of 1914–18’
to dissuade the Germans from diverting forces to the Somme. Poorly planned
and executed, the attack across the Flanders mud was a pointless exercise
that cost 5333 Australian lives in 27 hours. Fromelles, barely reported in the
Australian press, was a defeat disguised as a victory. CEW Bean’s dispatches
camouflaged the result as ‘something like an honourable draw’,69 and an editor
subtitled one of them to assure readers ‘All is well on Somme Front’.70 Tom
and Eliza Purcell had been anxiously scanning the casualties: ‘two lists … in
the Herald tonight’ (17 August). Their neighbours received a cable ‘stating that
[their son] will be on his feet again in a couple of months’. But it turned out
that Bob Crow had had a foot blown off, and Mr Robinson’s son had lost a leg.
Then, on 6 September, ‘Charlie Faux reported wounded and Bob Howey and
Delahey reported missing’. Four days later ‘Hunt was telling me that one of his
grandsons is missing’.71 On 12 September they knew eight men whose names
were included in two casualty lists totalling 1230 wounded, 163 dead and 173
missing. Such lists contrasted with up-beat reports of victorious advances:
‘Great charge made by the Irish Brigade in Flanders gaining nearly a mile.’72
Letters from Leo and George spared their parents the terror of Fromelles.
On 19 August, the day the Australians attacked, Tom and Eliza had comforting
news from their sons: ‘from 2nd to 11th July, they were then billeted in a barn
20 miles from the firing line.’ On 7 September cards and a letter, the latest
dated 18 July, described ‘a raid on German trenches and great casualties on
both sides. George has joined a bombing battery of four guns. A Great number
of Tivey’s Brigade wounded’. This had been just before the main assault at
Fromelles. On 23 July the Australians relieved the British at Pozieres, suffering
huge casualties. Bean privately described Pozieres as ‘a ghastly mincing
machine’, but one of his dispatches reported ‘fairly light’ casualties and he
continued to write about the Australians’ bravado and eagerness for battle.
Press coverage was contradictory and evasive.73 From this point, the Australian
press preferred British correspondents’ even more colourful reports ‘from the
front’, which were usually based on official army communiqués.74
Denied balanced reports of Western Front battles and aggregated casualty
statistics, readers yet saw from the casualty lists that there was no hope of a
quick victory in Europe. Casualty lists carried a bleak message, and enlistments
declined dramatically from their mid-1915 peaks during the recruitment
drives. Whereas in July and August 1915 enlistments had totalled over 62,000,
after Pozieres in 1916 this dropped to 6000 a month. Conservative politicians
and businessmen, concerned that Victorian patriotism was flagging, began not
merely suggesting but urging conscription. Trade unions and the Victorian
Labor Party, querying the notion of equality of sacrifice as working-class living
73
74
The La Trobe Journal No. 96 September 2015
standards declined, were reluctant to back recruiting, let alone compulsory
service. At home the terminology of a frighteningly industrialised war was
dominated by euphemisms for the dead and the vanished (‘the fallen’ and
‘the missing’), for their replacements (‘reinforcements’), and now for military
conscription (‘national service’). Prime Minister Billy Hughes visited Britain
where conscription was being introduced to ensure that enlistment did
not drain manpower from essential industries such as coal mining, metals
and munitions. Australian trade unions feared military conscription here
would destroy arbitration and the ideal of a living wage, and bring industrial
conscription in their wake.
‘Mannix … Milton’s Satan … a force of evil’
Brian Lewis was beginning to think that the Old Boys praised at Wesley
for dying gallantly for their country ‘had gone uselessly and inevitably to
slaughter’. At home there was no rush to read reports of victories that they
no longer believed in. ‘On and on the war was going; it would go on and on
and no end was in sight. We had started and would have to see it through.’75
Melbourne’s patriotic middle class began to look for scapegoats. First it
had been Australians of German origin. But, by 1916, loyalist animosity was
focused, increasingly, upon Irish Catholics, and upon Coadjutor Archbishop
Dr Daniel Mannix. ‘We detested Mannix’, Lewis recalled. ‘To us he was
Milton’s Satan, handsome, vivid and intelligent, but a force of evil.’76 The
war had become for Protestants a quasi religious war with its pantheon of
heroic figures – soldiers, stretcher bearers, nurses – and now, in Mannix, the
extreme Protestants had found their devil. This demonised Mannix produced
for Brian ‘memories’ charged with doubtful facts: that ‘Dr Mannix … started
giving trouble as soon as he arrived’,77 that ‘Mannix had opposed the war from
the outset’,78 and that, as ‘Carr’s coadjutor [that is, before May 1917], Mannix
spoke often and fluently against the war and against conscription’.79 None of
these statements can be supported, but what Brian Lewis (and presumably his
family) believed (or came to believe) about Mannix illustrates the power of
anti-Catholic sectarianism that predated the issue of conscription, and indeed
the war itself.
Whatever private feelings Mannix may have harboured at the outbreak
of war, for almost two years he made no public statement at variance with
the official Catholic position taken by Archbishop Carr.80 Conscription
roused him. Protestant churchmen, having synthesised war and Christianity,
regarded conscription as a legitimate means to an end, even as a moral
imperative, so that by early 1916, before conscription became a live political
‘The great madness of 1914–18’
issue, Protestant support was clear.81 In the Catholic view, conscription was a
political and not a doctrinal or moral issue, so the church was officially neutral.
But the position of the Catholic press swung from support for conscription in
1915 to one of opposition by early 1916. This occurred before the Easter Rising
in Dublin, as a result of growing Irish Catholic working-class resentment of
home-front sufferings and of rising sectarian Protestant disparagement of
Catholic loyalty and Catholic enlistment levels.82 Furthermore, Protestant
spokesmen doubted Catholic sincerity in deploring the Dublin uprising
and reaffirming loyalty to Empire. At Kooyong Road, the perfidy of Irish
revolt far outweighed the brutality of British reprisals: ‘now we called all
Irish “Sinn Fein”, and that was worse than being called a Hun.’83 Previously
fearful of the intolerant Ulster faction in the Presbyterian church, after Easter
1916 and during the conscription debate, ‘we began listening to the
propaganda of the Ulster Protestants’, which descended to the scurrilous and
semi-pornographic.84
While it is true that sectarian Protestants ‘prepared the ground that
Mannix won among Catholics later in the year’,85 and British behaviour after
Easter 1916 caused Mannix to doubt Britain’s war motives and objectives, the
archbishop’s opposition to conscription also reflected his maturing emotional
and intellectual engagement with working-class struggles for economic justice.
This identification, his latest biographer avers, following the lead given by
Val Noone, ‘began at St Mary’s [West Melbourne]’, the nub of an industrial
district that housed some of Melbourne most struggling Catholic families.86
Irish Catholic working-class opposition to conscription was not religious in
origin, nor was it sparked by the troubles in Ireland. Rather, it was part and
parcel of a gathering working-class opposition to the Melbourne business and
commercial elite’s push for compulsory overseas service in 1915–16.
‘[Today] will decide if [Australians are] to be shackled by militarism
or … remain a free Country’ (referendum day, 28 October 1916)
When in August 1916, Prime Minister Hughes announced a referendum on
conscription, Tom at first got the message badly muddled,87 but his confusion
did not last long. Early in October his son Tom was one of thousands of single
men aged 21–35 called up for training for home defence for the duration of
the war. With battle casualties mounting and enlistments in free fall, Hughes,
anticipating approval of conscription at the plebiscite on 28 October, intended
to have sufficient reinforcements ready for immediate dispatch to Europe.
The move backfired by adding to the ferment of a referendum in which, as
Lewis recalled, both sides condoned violence: ‘In the industrial suburbs no
75
76
The La Trobe Journal No. 96 September 2015
pro-conscription meeting was possible; it was almost as dangerous to have
an anti-conscription meeting in a middle-class suburb.’88 This misstates the
situation. Most municipal councils, including Labor councils, denied anticonscriptionists access to public venues. As Judith Smart has established,
working-class animosity erupted when anti-conscriptionists were denied access
to venues for their meetings. They took to the streets and vacant allotments,
and disrupted conscription meetings to refuse conscriptionists a hearing.89.
On 18 September Tom reported that ‘an immense gathering in Anderson
Street [Yarraville] carried a resolution against conscription unanimously’. That
day saw Tom’s only reference to the Irish troubles: ‘a great gathering at the
T[own] Hall for to take up a collection for the poor of Dublin.’ On 11 October:
‘I was at an anti-conscription meeting last night [in Footscray] there was one
fight and a woman bashed another fellow and nearly a third fight.’ He also
attended anti-conscription meetings in Melbourne: (Saturday 21 October)
‘I went in to see women and children march in procession to [the] Yarra
Bank there was an immense crowd gathered Mrs [sic] Pankhurst and others
spoke against conscription’. His diary also registered concerns about cheap
labour rumoured to be replacing conscripts: (26 September) ‘96 Maltese came
here by boat’. And the war casualties kept coming: (28 September) ‘Mat [sic]
Brophy has been killed in France’; (8 October) ‘Charlie Faux died of wounds’;
(10 October) ‘Tom [his son] sent in his claim for exemption today. Les Lolton
of Korumburra died of wounds’.
Tom branded the press coverage of the final week of the conscription
debate ‘a great week of lies’. On referendum day, 28 October, he wrote: ‘This
was a lively day and one of the most important for Australians in its history
today will decide if they are to be shackled by militarism or whether we are
to remain a free Country’. Sunday 5 November found him at the Yarra bank
to celebrate the no victory and to hear Frank Anstey attack Billy Hughes’s
decision to keep in camp for a month those called up for military training.
Tom’s son, who had duly registered at Yarraville but had applied for exemption
on health grounds, had his case heard in open court, as did a neighbour who,
having two brothers in France, was needed in the family construction business.
Men given temporary exemption from training by these courts (which
were staffed by local magistrates, and whose proceedings were reported by
the local press) were pressured to offer themselves later for overseas service.
On 23 November Tom noted with satisfaction the release of the trainees.
Henceforth he simply referred to the prime minister as ‘Hughes’; no more
‘Mr Hughes’. As Christmas approached – (12 December) ‘Mum is boiling
C. pudding today Dobbie [of] Footscray died of wounds’ – Tom was scouring
‘The great madness of 1914–18’
the press for rumours of peace: (16 December) ‘Germany is talking of peace’;
(22 December) ‘American President is asking both sides to state terms with a
view to peace’.
Tom Purcell was adamantly opposed to conscription, but it is striking that,
aside from a reference to the Dublin relief appeal in Melbourne, his diary for
1916 contains no mention of the Irish troubles, of Protestant sectarianism,
or of Dr Mannix, whose two references to conscription in 1916, brief and
conciliatory, were barely acknowledged by the Melbourne press.90 If, as some
historians have insisted, his early remarks sparked a public and very Protestant
furore, then Tom Purcell did not register it. In January 1917, Mannix ignited
press and Protestant fury when he described the conflict as ‘an ordinary sordid
trade war’ and questioned the purity of Britain’s war aims.91 But his critics
ignored the main thrust of his address: ‘It was impossible to find money to
develop Australia. But … it could be found in millions to hurl Australians to
their death in Europe’. War was distorting the Australian economy, causing
unemployment, and undermining workers’ right to work for a living wage.
‘What wonder if idle, starving men find themselves driven into socialism?’92
Although Mannix gave workers, and especially Catholic workers, greater
confidence to speak out, the resistance to conscription, as the archbishop must
have known, had been initiated by trade unionists, socialists, the Industrial
Workers of the World, pacifists and the women’s movement. These forces,
rather than Mannix, sustained the anti-conscription campaigns in 1916–17.93
In April 1917 Tom heard Mannix denounce Protestant bigotry at Moreland,
and was impressed,94 but his diary also testifies to the appeal exerted by antiwar radicals. He heard Adela Pankhurst speak at a street meeting in Middle
Footscray on 20 April, and next evening he heard Senate candidate Vida
Goldstein demand civil, legal and wage equality for the sexes, and denounce
‘the new cult of National Service [which] meant industrial conscription
and the loss of all that has been gained by arbitration, wages boards and
unionism’.95 A week later on Sunday 29 April, Tom was at the Yarra bank where
‘Miss Vida Goldstein and Miss Pankhurst [,] Fullerton etc Fleming, Lynch etc
etc’ spoke. And the following week (6 May) he was again at a ‘Great gathering on
the Yarra Bank’ to hear Goldstein and Pankhurst. Tom’s enthusiasm outlasted
the election. On Sunday 13 May he attended a ‘women’s peace meeting’
that was addressed by Mrs Singleton, Miss Fullerton, Miss John[s], and
Rev Frederick Sinclaire, whose denunciation of the exploiters of the poor
affected him strongly.
Moved by Pankhurst, the Socialist Party of Victoria had declared its warm
admiration for the archbishop’s bold, incisive, and courageous denunciation
77
78
The La Trobe Journal No. 96 September 2015
of the sordid trade war.96 But Mannix was hardly interested in the approval
of doctrinaire socialists. He and his confidante and fellow campaigner for
educational justice for Catholic schools, Fr William Lockington, understood
the attraction of socialism among workers, and issues of war, conscription
and peace could not be left to the socialists: ‘They need not fear bigotry’,
Lockington told the Australian Catholic Federation, but rather the ‘active,
subtle and unscrupulous enemy in their midst … working with dire persistence
to hurt Australia … the anti-Christian revolutionist’.97 Mannix’s attempt in
1913–14 to galvanise the Catholic vote in support of state aid to religious
schools had failed – Catholic workers simply refused to abandon the Labor
Party – and now he was identifying himself with working-class opposition to
the war.98 During 1917 his speeches would increasingly echo what Val Noone
has identified as anti-imperialist rhetoric derived from liberal, Marxist and
syndicalist sources,99 and he would claim working-class support beyond his
Catholic base.
‘I don’t remember ever being worse off in my life’ (‘Soldier’s Dad’)
The Lewises could not have comprehended working-class want, let
alone working-class anger with conservative demands for the inordinate
sacrifice that conscription of their menfolk would bring. Wartime
wages freezes, inflation and irregular unemployment had undermined
living standards, and workers were angered by federal Labor’s abandonment
of a price control referendum, as well as the refusal to release stockpiles
of foodstuffs for which there was no shipping. Unemployment
and poverty exposed men to ‘economic’ conscription. As early as March
1915 Tom had written of the local foundry employing Leo, ‘They have put
off five factory hands and two more are going this week’. And, the
following day: ‘All the men off today at H[olden] and Lewis excepting
the boys.’100 Recruiters’ targeting of industrial workplaces implied that
declining enlistments were a working-class responsibility. Certainly the
war hit middle-class incomes and broke up families, but families such as the
Lewises had extra resources. Their credit was good, and they coped reasonably
well on regular military allotments from four sons, and by taking in near
relatives as paying guests (‘We could not take boarders’).101 His school fees
covered by Owen’s military allotment, Brian was able to go to Wesley after all.
On the other side of Melbourne, in Footscray, ‘Soldier’s Dad’ wrote to his local
paper urging Protestants harping on the drink question to talk instead about
the great questions of the day – ‘Food Prices, House Rents, Unemployment,
and Conscription’. ‘Another Soldier’s Dad’ agreed:
‘The great madness of 1914–18’
Left: Thomas and Eliza Purcell. Courtesy Tony Purcell
Right: Archbishop Daniel Mannix with Fr William Lockington SJ, 1917. Lockington was
parish priest at Richmond 1913–16 and rector of St Patrick’s College, East Melbourne
1916–23. State Library of Victoria Pictures Collection H2010.174/29
I have three sons at the Front (two of whom have made an allotment of
pay to their mother), but, like ‘Soldier’s Dad’, I have had a very hard time
for the last 12 months; in fact, I don’t remember ever being worse off in
my life. I am quite unable (probably owing to age) to obtain any form of
employment other than a day or two now and again, whilst my own trade
is at a standstill. But I’m still expected to smile ‘with pride’, and to ‘keep the
homes fires burning’, although it is mighty hard sometimes to find a match
to set them going.102
These fathers wrote at a time when thousands of Melbourne families had
just been through the greatest industrial convulsion since the maritime strike
79
80
The La Trobe Journal No. 96 September 2015
of 1890. Unemployment, intermittent work, and short time combined with
the inflation of food prices and rents to produce suffering and resentment
that boiled over in the spring of 1917. In August Melbourne waterside
workers’ refusal to handle food exports until domestic food prices were
lowered became entangled with a New South Wales wharfies’ strike in
support of railway workers who were resisting the imposition of speed-up
systems of labour control. The unionist principle of refusing to handle ‘black’
goods (goods handled by non-union labour) had a snowballing effect, and
carters, drivers and seamen were quickly drawn in. A month later, Tom Purcell
noted, ‘No sign of strike being over yet. Ropeys came out’.103 Yarraville’s rope
workers had joined their neighbouring sugar refinery and fertiliser plant
workers. With raw materials and coal supplies exhausted, factory closures
put more out of work than were on strike. At Fitzroy, Fr Lockington took
up the cause of the destitute female confectionary workers. Coal shortages
and the consequent rationing of work meant that Melbourne was not back at
work until November. When, at the height of the dispute, secretary for labour
Henry Murphy revealed publicly in the Archbishop Mannix’s lecture series
that employers had been making large profits by passing labour costs on to
consumers, Dr Mannix commented ‘Was there not in that a great temptation
for strikes in Australia?’104 Brian’s memoir suggests that the Lewis family
could only comprehend protest and dissent as disloyalist, Irish and Catholic.
‘Archbishop Mannix,’ Brian recorded in all seriousness, ‘leads the faction
which controls the extreme trade unions that hamper the winning of the
war.’105 He was echoing accusations of trade union treachery, when the Great
Strike of 1917 was in fact an ill-coordinated rank-and-file revolt that collapsed
in acrimony and bitterness.106 The war that showed no sign of ending and the
ferment on the home front were generating acute levels of anxiety among
those with loved ones at the warfront. The Lewis family’s anxieties were being
displaced onto Melbourne’s Irish Catholics.107
At their Armadale church an honour board had been erected to honour
those who had enlisted and to encourage others. The problem was that the
congregation had only one single eligible man remaining, so boys under 21
began either inflating their ages or obtaining their parents’ consent, and
married men with children joined them. When Athol Lewis embarked in
February 1917, the family initiated a Friday evening ritual: James read a chapter
from the Bible, they knelt for the Lord’s Prayer, and then the boys’ weekly
letters were read aloud. ‘All four brothers were in danger and we all prayed for
them.’108 The family’s Sunday rituals were standard for liberal Presbyterians
at this time, but the institution of family prayers is a striking sign of their
‘The great madness of 1914–18’
acute stress, for such worship had been declining among Protestants.109 The
Purcells also had their rituals; every mass was preceded by the pope’s prayer
for peace in Europe, and there were special masses for George and Leo,
for wounded friends, and for the souls of friends killed at war. Claims that
Catholic enlistments were lagging were met by Catholic rebuttals. On Sunday
8 April 1917 a Catholic Young Men’s Society honour board was unveiled by
the parish priest at St Augustine’s church, Yarraville. ‘Leo’s name is on it,’ Tom
wrote that evening:
[President of the society] Vaughan said that Catholics were unjustly accused
of not having done their share whilst over 600 young men from various
C[atholic] societies have enlisted, 15 from Yarraville, one having been killed.
Fr Egan unveiled the board and Mr McClosky responded on behalf of the
relatives and friends of those who volunteered.
Protestant comparisons of enlistment according to religious affiliation
were founded on foolish rivalries, prejudices and ignorance. Tom’s diary
was full of references to his friends’ sons who had been killed or wounded,
or were missing, and it is doubtful that he recorded only Catholic casualties:
(31 January) ‘Nare’s eldest brother 26 wounded on 13 Nov’; (31 January) Aunt
Annie’s wounded son Jim was saved by an officer who gave him all his drink
while they lay undiscovered, but ‘the poor fellow [the officer] died’; (8 March)
Rawlings’s family was notified of his death on 17 February, with a mass for
him on the 18th; Gordon T was ‘amongst the seriously wounded list’; (15
March) ‘Mary Duckworth’s boy killed in February in France after 2 years and
5 months service’; (24 March) Mr Doupe received a letter from the chaplain
who attended Harry as he lay dying; (31 March) ‘Jim Dunstan died of wounds
rec[eive]d in France’; (Sunday 22 April) ‘One of the McArdle boys has been
killed in France, they got word on Saturday’. And so the news kept coming.
Although military authorities seem never to have published aggregate
casualty figures in 1917, and the war news remained evasively general in tone,
neighbourhood talk, obituaries in local newspapers, and casualty lists in the
daily papers made it evident in 1917 that the AIF was engaged in its most
intensive fighting so far in the war. In the 12 months of 1917 there were 55,000
Australian casualties, about 40 per cent of the total over the 42 months from
April 1915 to November 1918. Enlistments continued to decline. By the end
of 1917 recruitment campaigns aiming to raise 5500 volunteers a month failed
to yield much more than half the target. The collapse of volunteering virtually
ensured another, and even more bitterly fought, referendum.
81
82
The La Trobe Journal No. 96 September 2015
‘There are as many lies as truths appearing
in the press, it all helps to fill up space’
The Purcells and the Lewises continued their attempts to make sense of
press coverage, which gave little sense of the battles in which Australians
were engaged. Neither family appears to have realised that the major Allied
offensives at Arras and on the Somme took place against an enemy that had
withdrawn to heavily fortified and more defensible positions (the Hindenburg
Line). These included Bullecourt where, during the first 24 hours of battle
in April, the Australians lost 3400 men, and a further 7000 in two weeks of
the second battle. ‘Despite the horrifying statistics,’ historians Anderson
and Trembath comment, ‘the conflict was still reported using the standard
euphemisms … Australian always did well.’110 CEW Bean’s despatch on first
Bullecourt – ‘Australians make history’ – was designed to boost recruitment.
Tom Purcell now dismissed press claims:
Mon[day] 14th [May] … there was a casualty list in the Herald of Saturday
over 1000 wounded 200 killed. It is reported today Bullecourt has been
taken from the Germans. It may or may not be true, there are as many lies as
truths appearing in the press, it all helps to fill up space. So long as it brings
in the cash, what does it matter £ S. D.
The First Anzac Corps was withdrawn from the Somme and thrown into
General Haig’s Flanders offensive (Third Battle of Ypres). ‘Here,’ Brian Lewis
wrote, ‘we were told nothing’ of the slaughter, and ‘we could not see [the
gains] on our maps.’111 The Ypres salient had cost 250,000 Allied dead. The
three Australian divisions were withdrawn in mid November, their grievous
losses – 6500 men, one-fifth of their operational strength – softened by stories
of Anzac heroism.112
Unable to trust their newspapers, families turned to their boys’ letters
from the front. Australians (and New Zealanders) were already prolific
correspondents, ranking fourth in the world for the number of letters (67)
sent annually per head of population.113 But the war released a tsunami of
correspondence between the home and war fronts: almost 4000 million letters,
newspapers, and packets went through the Australian mail service 1914–19.114
Tom Purcell wrote at least once a week to his sons, and received replies most
weeks; Brian Lewis remembered his brothers’ weekly letters as ‘Four personal
accounts of the war, all written in a different style and all written vividly’.115
Historians disagree about the historical value of wartime letters. Paul
Fussell found them unreliable as ‘factual testimony about the [Great] war’,
because of their ‘unique style of almost unvarying formulaic understatement’,
‘The great madness of 1914–18’
reflecting ‘a decent solicitude for the feelings of the recipient’.116 Martyn
Lyons, writing on French wartime correspondence, agreed: soldiers’ letters
and postcards, banal, formulaic, and platitudinous, were designed not to reveal
the truth as much as to disguise it.117 Although many Australian military and
social historians have used soldiers’ letters, few appear to have commented
on the many thousands of letters and extracts from letters published in local
weekly and regional and metropolitan daily newspapers across Australia,
and fewer have asked what effect this correspondence had on home front
opinion of the war or on civilian morale. The Purcell and Lewis letters were
not published, but Brian tells us that his brothers’ letters (or at least some of
them) were copied and circulated to friends and aunts.118 Brian describes the
letters as comforting, good humoured and optimistic. And yet he also writes
about letters from Gallipoli concerning the poor performance of Britain’s
New Army under mediocre English leaders, before these subjects were openly
discussed in the opinion columns of the press, as well as letters that told of
incompetent and callous British leadership in France.119
Whatever censorship was applied to letters, it is clear from Tom Purcell’s
diary, from his admittedly rare comments, that there was enough in them to
unnerve their readers.120 Even when designed to assuage loved ones’ worries,
letters were at least six weeks out of date by the time they were received. On
16 April 1917 Tom and Lizzie ‘got several letters from Leo and George [the]
latest dated 15 February, they have been on the Somme front since November
[1916], and were then on the move, their Div[ision] the fifth having suffered the
greatest losses of any’. Such uncensored comments about losses to divisions,
brigades, and more commonly battalions and sub-units, were common in
letters published in the press. Concerning further letters, received on 5 May
but dated about 26 February, Tom wrote: ‘George and Leo … were then [sic]
well.’ There was no telling, as parents read letters, what had befallen their sons.
‘The Pope,’ Tom wrote on 17 August 1917, ‘has made an appeal to all nations
in favour of a lasting peace but is criticised by the English press. What a pity
the critics could not be placed in the front ranks.’ On 3 September he noted
‘Plenty of gas where Leo is now’ and, on 1 August, he learned that George had
been in hospital since mid June. At the end of the month he was advised that
George was to be invalided home. In fact, George had been in hospital almost
continuously since March, but it seems that his parents had not been advised,
and he had not worried them with his health troubles, which dated from July
1916. Promoted bombardier and then a corporal with duties as gunner and
bombardier, George had his eardrum shattered and the temporal plate in his
skull broken by explosions, shrapnel hits and the noise of trench mortars.
83
84
The La Trobe Journal No. 96 September 2015
He also had cardiac troubles arising from his heavy work carrying shells. With
George on his way home, Tom transferred his anxieties to Leo, who was in
Belgium, according to the letter he received on 20 September. Another letter,
written on 2 September and received on 6 November, contained the news that
several of Leo’s mates had been killed or wounded. Leo had another year of
war before, in September 1918, he was invalided to England with a gunshot
wound, and sent home in January 1919.
All four Lewis boys were in the thick of the fighting in 1916–17,
as tunnellers or artillerymen in France and Belgium.121 Owen had
left Australia in May 1916, Keith finished his leave and re-embarked in
June 1916, Ralph joined him in March 1917, and Athol went as a gunner in
February 1917. Ralph was the first casualty. A letter received on the first
Friday of July 1917 suggested he had a safe position in his tunnelling
company HQ but, on the following Monday, the family was advised that he
had been severely wounded by gunshot. Ralph was the only survivor of a
heavy bombardment. His leg would be saved, but soon after a head wound put
him in hospital for six months. Ralph arrived home in February 1918, his face
scarred and dented by shrapnel, and seeming to Brian unusually quiet and
rather shaky. Owen, who had transferred to the Flying Corps, was next
to be wounded, twice, the second time seriously with twenty bullet holes
and the loss of a couple of toes. He was patched up and sent back to France
in November. Keith was still with his tunnelling company and Athol with
the medium artillery when news came that Owen had been killed in action
on 12 April 1918. He was just 21. The family continued with its Friday ritual
of reading the weekly letters from Keith, Athol – and Owen: ‘For five more
Fridays those letters from the dead were read and filed.’122 The family’s
mourning was restrained. Edith had been proudly wearing the badge, issued
by the government to encourage enlistment, with its four bars signifying her
four serving sons: ‘Now she was entitled to add a star to one of the bars. She
never wore that badge again’.123
Ronnie was now 20 and free to enlist without his parents’ permission,
but the family did not want him to go. So he agreed to finish his university
year in college, ‘but it was a nasty year for him’.124 Virulent Ulster Protestant
sectarianism had alienated Catholic support for conscription, the Lewises
thought, and now the Ulster men were pressuring eligibles like Ronnie to
enlist.125 The Lewises, noticing more and more that some of the patriots’
sons had either failed to enlist or had taken safe jobs behind the lines,126 were
grateful, however, when John Monash, an old friend of James from engineering
days, removed Athol from danger.
‘The great madness of 1914–18’
Their sister Phyllis was engaged to Bob Menzies, a promising, socially
acceptable law student who, although eligible to serve, gave no signs of
enlisting. Menzies’s two elder brothers were serving overseas, but their parents
had decided that Bob would remain at home to support them, as necessary.127
Even though they discouraged Ronnie from enlisting, the Lewises seemed
unable to comprehend the Menzies wanting to reserve one son. Nor could
they understand Bob Menzies’ support for conscription – ‘We felt it odd that
Bob should be concerned with sending unwilling men to the war’128 – when
conscription perhaps offered him the only chance to defy his parents’ wishes.
Tensions increased: ‘Owen had been killed and Bob was safe at home.’129 The
engagement was broken off.
The year 1917 had reached a crescendo with the second conscription
referendum, taken just five days before Christmas. ‘The bad feeling of the first
referendum,’ Brian Lewis thought, ‘became bitter hatred in the second. It was
not impossible that the violence might have developed into real civil war.’
He attributed the bitterness to Archbishop Mannix, now speaking from public
platforms as well as church premises, and ridiculing the talk about equality
of sacrifice:
The wealthy classes would be very glad to send the last man, but they have
no notion of giving the last shilling, nor even the first. (Loud applause). I
warn you not to be under the delusion that the capitalists will, in the end,
pay for the war … In reality, the burthen in the end will be borne by the
toiling masses of Australia. (Applause).130
On 21 December Tom Purcell recorded the ‘Great victory for no
against conscription’. The no vote had increased, and in Victoria the
vote had moved, narrowly, from yes to no. ‘The referendum,’ Brian Lewis
observed, gave us a nasty Christmas present … A miserable Christmas and
a sad end to a very bad year.’131 He managed, however, to draw comfort
from the defeat of conscription. After four years of madness, logic,
perhaps, was not to be expected: ‘If [unwilling conscripts] had been sent
they would have smeared our image of our fighting men’s self-sacrifice.
Our Armistice and Anzac days would not have been so moving.’132
‘It had been a sordid war … nothing like we had imagined in 1914’
All the home-front sound and fury simply confirmed the Purcells and
the Lewises in their entrenched positions on enlistment, recruitment
and conscription. Nationally, public opinion was not as volatile as we
sometimes imagine.
85
86
The La Trobe Journal No. 96 September 2015
The conscription issued cleaved Australia in two: the no vote in 1916
was 51.6 per cent, and it rose to 53.8 per cent in 1917. Victoria voted 51.9 per
cent yes in 1916, and 53.4 per cent no in 1917. It was foolish of Billy Hughes
and his backers to think that they could produce a shift in public opinion
sufficient, not only to produce a majority for yes, but to deliver a decisive
enough victory to preserve social order and a national commitment to see the
war through. Hughes overestimated the volatility of public opinion. The vote
against conscription in 1916 was delivered by less than two per cent of some
2,500,000 voters. Some 50,000 fewer votes were cast nationally in the 1917
referendum, almost 20,000 of them in Victoria. It was as if a section of the
electorate, exhausted, could not decide one way or the other. The narrowness
of the results, and the withdrawal of electors in 1917, shows just how fraught
the referenda were.
A sophisticated attempt has been made to explain the voting,133 but
the simplest analysis reveals that in Melbourne the class factor was hugely
powerful: industrial working-class subdivisions voted no – Yarraville voted
71 per cent against in 1916, and 74 per cent against in 1917 – and middleclass residential subdivisions voted yes – Armadale voted 73 per cent in
favour in 1916, and 72 per cent in 1917. The pattern was repeated across the
metropolitan area. Melbourne was almost evenly split on the issue, the class
division contrasting starkly between suburbs north and west of the Yarra, and
those east and south.
Notions that Australia’s war was ‘a middle-class war’, and that the working
class, and Irish Catholic workers in particular, did not enlist proportionately
in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF), were nonsensical.134 Judging from
Robson’s 1973 analysis of the occupational profile of the AIF, we may say
that it broadly reflected the social composition of the male workforce,135 and
that was true also of religious affiliations.136 Loose comparisons of suburban
enlistments across Melbourne – such as Michael McKernan’s comparison
of Richmond with Camberwell and South Yarra (a district of Prahran)137 –
are misleading, as they make no allowance for the pools of available eligible
men. Comparisons on a municipal basis, taking into account eligible male
populations, discredit notions of a working-class/middle-class disparity in
enlistments,138 confirming the occupational analysis that reveals the AIF to
have been a socially representative Australian army. The conservative patriots’
campaign for conscription in pursuit of equality of sacrifice was thus based on
a false premise. But the valid working-class resentment of conservative failure
to conscript wealth and to arrest falling living standards fed resistance to
conscription that might have compounded the existing inequality of sacrifice.
‘The great madness of 1914–18’
Tom Purcell’s diary reveals a man caught up by the turbulent issues of
enlistment, conscription, and a just peace. His passions were aroused when
two of his sons enlisted, the Labor Party split and Catholic loyalties were
impugned. It is not clear that Ireland’s wrongs motivated him, but events in
Melbourne enhanced his Catholic identity: Tom swelled with pride at the
great spectacle presented by Archbishop Carr’s funeral in May 1917:
one of the largest in [the] southern Hemisphere … It took nearly two hours
to pass a given point … immense crowds … all along the route … must have
created a great impression and caused many people to think what a mighty
institution the Catholic Church is and the unity of it.139
His diary records the sharpening of his traditional working-class
convictions, his readiness to listen to radical ideas, and his resentment of
attacks on his archbishop, his church and his pope. But he appears not to have
become a hater. Wanting the war to end as soon as possible, he expressed no
support for volunteering or recruitment and attended no purely patriotic
events. He supported war’s victims. The threat of conscription perhaps made
him fear for his other sons. He listened to anti-war speakers avidly, but did not
necessarily identify himself with their views. He attended masses that prayed
for peace and for the safety of his sons and their comrades in arms, regarded
the war as a moral tragedy, and placed his faith in the pope’s peace efforts. As
a Catholic he acted as his conscience dictated, and not as governments bid.
Our War, though covered by a patina of hindsight, strikingly exposes a
family’s dogged devotion to the notion of ‘victory’. ‘It had been a sordid war’,
Brian mused, echoing Archbishop Mannix, ‘nothing like we had imagined in
1914.’140 But the war had been just and had to be fought to the end, whatever
the cost, to them as a family or to the nation. War weariness, though acute,
did not lead the Lewises to question the wisdom of war, even when they
became aware that the press, the politicians and the generals lied to them. The
Lewises gave more than most families to the war effort and remained hostages
to their ethnic (English), religious (Presbyterian), and middle-class identity.141
The terrible blow of Owen’s death perhaps made defeat doubly unthinkable,
because defeat might define his death as wasteful.
The diary and the memoir tell us that Australia did not go to war united in
1914–15, and that the nation was even more divided by war’s end. The world’s
most advanced democracy, so far from Europe, was never willing, despite
what its leaders promised in 1914, to commit all of its able-bodied men and
resources to the open-ended, industrialised war that it quickly revealed itself
to be. We might draw comfort from that.
87